For most of my life, I thought yoga was stupid. I remember well the first class I took. It was 15 years ago, I was a junior in college in Philadelphia. My roommate at the time, a rower from Brentwood, California, told me about the studio. I'd visited her over Thanksgiving break, and we went for hard runs in the hills, passing unceremoniously by taut-bodied power moms grimly pounding the dirt. We shared that college-girl jock thing of being really into fitness in a way that helped obscure a generalized eating disorder. We talked about food a lot. Eating it and not eating it. And we talked about working out a lot. Miles logged and miles not yet logged. But we had it in our minds that we were superior to the shiny sorority girls encumbered by body-image issues. They were self-loathing; we were in great shape. We thought of our bodies as objects, things outside ourselves—burdens, really, to be managed so as to be less of an embarrassment. When you did this well, when the object had been properly toned and shaped into the desired mold, you could rest. It might even feel good, for an hour or two, to put on a small dress and go out to a party and drink too much on an empty stomach. But the next day the battle would begin anew.

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It was my roommate who first told me about the yoga studio just north of Rittenhouse Square, and I silently judged her for it. An hour-long yoga class was an hour she could have spent reading econ on the stationary bike. But a fellow type A's enthusiasm for something so touchy-feely was intriguing to me, so off I went one weekend afternoon. I jogged the mile and a half to the studio, ensuring I'd get my cardio for the day. I walked into a regal old brownstone and into the airy, serene studio space. I took my borrowed mat, rolled it out next to a white guy with dreads, and made my way through the next hour of assorted postures, gentle chanting, and attempted headstands. Then I jogged home. I never returned. For the next seven years, yoga was something I might do on my day off from working out, or if I had a fever.

David Foster Wallace once explained his disinclination to discuss his substance abuse and recovery as coming from a recognition that the things he had to say about the subject were so depressingly quotidian. So regular. So akin, really, to bad, flat writing. That's on my mind as I try to explain what happened in my late twenties, the way my perception of what mattered, what I wanted, and who I was began to turn to dust. I'm not addicted to drugs or alcohol, but you might describe me as a recovering good girl. I'd done everything that was asked of me, achieved everything I was supposed to. And yet I was miserable.

When I read my journal from that time, it's as if I were going through a delayed adolescence. I'd been a fairly together teenager, looking over my shoulder to see how to be cool, sure, but also quietly confident in who I was, even if I'd yet to fully introduce that person to anyone else. Ten years later, I was beginning journal entries with, "It's 10 A.M. and I've already had four different moods." There's an entire passage about how I'm afraid I'm going to kill an orchid given to me and my ex as a gift, and how that's a metaphor for our relationship and for life itself. It all reads like outtakes from Go Ask Alice.

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I was in a permanent everything-everywhere-is-ending kind of mood. And it is. "We are stardust," you know? But that's not what my problem was. It was that in spite of my good education, I was completely unprepared for life. I had no idea how to contend with the basic truths, like the fact that we all die or that love sometimes ends without anything going wrong or that if you're 28 and haven't yet become a vet, you probably never will. I'd done very well on essay exams pondering themes like these, but I had no idea how to contend with them in real life. I knew how to think about life. I did not know how to live it.

Looking back, there were some real-world events that triggered my crisis of faith: the dissolution of a six-year, marriagelike relationship; the fatal drug overdose of a close friend—a guy I had been subconsciously saving for when I was done being this me and ready to be a new, better, freer version; the total numbness I felt after achieving a few hard-fought career successes. To paraphrase Carrie Fisher's alter ego in Postcards From the Edge, I looked at my life and recognized so much of it as good, but I couldn't feel any of it. The sickening sense of waste that realization engendered got me questioning pretty much everything. Why did I care about the things I cared about? Who taught me that they mattered? Why did I listen? Which isn't to suggest that I was ready to endorse an across-the-board repudiation of A+ seeking and exercising and Western society in general. It's not that simple. Much of what I'd done in my life did matter to me, but some of it really didn't. But which was which? I wanted to press PAUSE on the universe and sit down cross-legged somewhere with a giant mug of coffee and some snacks and methodically examine, one by one, each moment in my life and ask who'd been in charge of it, me or someone else—and if the latter, did I like the direction in which I'd been set? But there was no system in my old life to help me navigate this process. My old life had no room for yoga. And at this point, that seemed like a good sign that yoga had something to offer me. So I went back.

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Just as with my first attempt, the second time around I had a like-minded enabler. A driven, damaged good girl I knew from the office who was polite and charming and attractive and totally emotionally unwell. We became friends. Comrades, really, in laughing at our own on-the-nose sadnesses and remaining hopeful that we might find a way to transcend them. Wherever she went, she brought with her a water bottle she'd spike with Emergen-C, a telltale Bikram yogi habit. I remember her dumping that orange powder into my Vitaminwater bottle before I took my first class in January 2008: 105 degrees; 26 postures performed twice, in counted-down-to-the-second pockets of time, narrated by the meticulously scripted, comically ungrammatical dialogue of the practice's controversial founder, Bikram Choudhury. That first class I suffered alongside a hundred or so hungover New Year's resolution holdouts. By early February, the herd had thinned significantly. By spring break, I'd started to recognize an assortment of regulars. And by deep summer—test-your-commitment time for hot-yoga practitioners in the sticky, stinking city—I'd clearly become one of them.

"Lots of people arrive at yoga running from one destructive pattern or another and swap the ready-made lifestyle ... for that bad boyfriend or all those vodka sodas."

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I'd come to learn that lots of people arrive at yoga running from one destructive pattern or another and swap the ready-made lifestyle—downward-facing dog and Lululemon and green juice—for that bad boyfriend or all those vodka sodas. The neuroscientists tell us that you never really break a pattern, you overwrite it, so it's a pretty good idea to simply start putting something good in the place you'd carved out for something bad. But of all the styles of yoga I've practiced and studios I've visited all over the world, it's been my experience that Bikram attracts people with the most extreme, destructive habits.

I'm aware now of what was only beginning to emerge in the press back then, namely that Bikram Choudhury himself has a reputation as a misogynist, racist, and homophobe. He's currently being sued by six former students for rape or sexual assault, though he has denied the charges. There's an apologists' aphorism about "separating the yoga from the man" that gets tossed around by Bikram acolytes when this topic comes up. I've never met Bikram, or encountered anything like the kind of abuse he's allegedly inflicted. And I have to say that my home Bikram studio in Manhattan is a decidedly feminist, progressive place. But it has hosted a slew of troubled people. In the many, many hours I've spent hanging around outside a hot room, coming down after class, I've met junkies and abuse victims, chronic depressives and anorexics, cutters and alcoholics, recent divorcées and struggling new moms. Once I took class with a charismatic, good-looking guy in his late twenties who'd never done Bikram before but had been an All-American soccer star, or so he casually mentioned to all the girls as we lined up in sports bras and hot shorts at the studio door. He collapsed 50 minutes in; afterward, sipping coconut water and crying on a bench outside the studio, he confessed that he was in his second week of chemo for cancer.

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Bikram is an intense practice, and I was drawn to it for all the qualities it would eventually teach me to reject. It was punitive, regimented, illogically disciplined. Its followers were unapologetically fanatical. And its message, at least upon introduction, had nothing to with spirituality or self-acceptance but in fact the apparent opposite, as I heard it: Your mind is the enemy; show up and surrender to this literal external voice (your teacher, repeating a scripted monologue) and you'll find relief. Simple.

My conversion was quick and full-fledged. In the spot in my life that had been occupied by long runs and worrying about bullshit, I put Bikram yoga. And at first the relationship was no more complex than that. It was a service I hired someone to perform. I went, I did what the teacher said, and for 90 minutes and a few yoga-high hours afterward, my usual floating sense of diffuse anxiety lifted. It always came back, but yoga provided a nice reprieve. I fell in love with practicing this yoga, and like any love, the first stage was giddy. Everything else in my life became less important than getting to the studio. I became an expert on the best teachers in New York. Every time I made plans, I'd first pull up a screenshot of the yoga schedule on my phone to see where I could fit in comparatively insignificant things like doing my job or seeing my friends. And then, slowly but surely, my friends became the people I did yoga with. I was accepted as a work-study student at my studio, meaning once a week I manned the desk, did laundry, wiped up sweat, cleaned showers, and got people coconut water in exchange for unlimited free classes. I started to understand the society built around churches. My studio wasn't my whole life, but it was a home base. A source of respite, of community. I made friends. I went to their birthday parties, art openings, and holiday dinners. I dated first one and then a second yoga instructor. And somewhere along the way, I started liking my body.

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In the spot in my life that had been occupied by long runs and worrying about bullshit, I put Bikram yoga.

That was weird. After all those years of trying to get what Kurt Vonnegut called "the meat" to obey, it was pretty wild to feel affection toward, for example, my hamstrings because they allowed me to do standing bow pose, or the arches of my feet because they're high and allow me stability in so-called awkward pose (think of sitting in a chair). Since my early teens, I'd had erratic periods, diagnosed by gynecologists as amenorrhea, which literally means "abnormal absence of menstruation," as in, we have no fucking idea why this is happening to you, make sure to leave your co-pay on the way out. The recommended treatment? The Pill. Six months into a regular Bikram practice, my period just started showing up, regularly. For this and many other reasons (everyone should date a yoga guy once), I, for the first time, saw my body as a gift, to be cherished and protected and lived in with joy.

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At the same time, a parallel shift was happening in my mind. To put it simply, I started seeing things and hearing voices. Of course, the things I saw had been there all along and the voice I heard was my own, but still. A year or two before I started practicing and after my friend had overdosed, I was in Seville, Spain, with my father. I was in a semifugue state during that trip, lobotomized by grief and what I'd later perceive as mourning the end of childhood. After dinner one night in the town square, my dad left me on a bench while he went to find a flamenco show for that evening. Sitting at dusk in the urgent spring air, surrounded by orange trees in full bloom, their bright green leaves iridescent and glowing under the streetlights, I felt the trees were talking to me, in that way that happens in dreams where words haven't been said but the meaning is clear: Everything was going to be okay.

Months later, I remembered myself in that moment as completely out of my mind. Trees don't talk. And yet after a few years of regular yoga practice, a modified, less hallucinatory version of that altered state became more common in my regular life. Random plants started talking to me all the time! Okay, I'm joking, but I did start to feel more connected to nature. And as I became more accustomed to that connection, I started to see it, really, as my becoming more accustomed to my actual self. I realized I'd always been practicing yoga—when my Girl Scout troop went to the Pecos Wilderness, and a counselor taught me to stick my six-year-old nose into the bark of a ponderosa pine and inhale the rough vanilla smell. In high school, when during long runs through the Corrales, New Mexico, desert, I'd stop thinking about SAT prep or boys, and the feel of my breath syncing with my moving limbs would lull me into a state of active detachment. Driving down Rio Grande Boulevard in the summer in the '83 Volvo station wagon (RIP) with one foot out the window. The sweet embarrassment I felt the first time a boy kissed me. And most of all, on horseback. A competitive rider as a girl, I repeatedly got the same correction from trainers that I'd later hear on a loop from yoga teachers: "Stop thinking."

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I'd always had a slide show of visceral memories like these mixed with fully formed but nonverbalized thoughts—like those triggered by the trees in Spain—playing in my preconscious mind early in the morning, right before I woke up for real. Now a version of that slide show was playing much closer to the surface of my waking life, accessible whenever I wanted to dip in and look. And, as any meditation practitioner will tell you, there was suddenly just this sliver of space between my thoughts and my actual self. I could laugh at them when they seemed ridiculous and hang out with them when they seemed right on. I would come out of savasana with entire paragraphs magically worked out in my head, or sometimes, as I wrote, the Spanish tree voice would jump in and tell me to go read a Hemingway short story I hadn't thought about since I was 15. Then one day, in the middle of class, I knew it was time to stop practicing Bikram yoga.

My entry point to this practice had been harshness—I was attracted to the extreme heat, the very brutality of the physical experience. But along the way, without my even realizing it, Bikram had been softening me up. It had been teaching me to feel. And after a few years, being in a hot room five days a week, stretching out already pretty limber muscles and tendons stopped feeling good. But admitting that was a threat to the lifestyle I'd crafted. When I began this essay, I thought it was going to be about what it was like to leave the Bikram world, to watch as a group of people you'd known well and loved were just sloughed off. To feel newly separated and, on occasion, judged for that separation. When I'd run into Bikram friends, usually at (where else?) Whole Foods, I'd get looks of compassionate disappointment for answering the nonquestion, "I haven't seen you in class recently…," with the admission that I was doing a lot more Vinyasa these days. That happened a few times, but mostly my former Bikram buddies and I would both just nod and say hi and promise to get together for lunch and never do it. It was like we were kids who went to the same school—we'll always have sophomore year—but then I transferred. But it was less "we hate you now that you're not one of us" and more "this is how life is": You are part of something, and things change; you are with someone, until you both move on; you are here, and then you're gone.

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It's funny; these days, you could say I lead much more of a yoga lifestyle than I did when I was practicing Bikram. Back then, I was still pricing home juicers. These days, I'm into all of it: matcha drinking, essential oil blending, sound healing. Last year, two friends and I went wild at Mama's Minerals, a gigantic crystal emporium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, then sat at my parents' kitchen table and explained the thinking behind crystal therapy to my brother, a U.S. diplomat and former national-team rower. That was fun. Since I quit practicing Bikram every day, I've studied on and off at a bunch of New York's most renowned studios, from Jivamukti to Dharma to Katonah. Two years ago, I became a certified yoga teacher via Laughing Lotus's (incredible) teacher training program. But I find that whenever I get deep into one particular practice, a voice returns and guides me away. Never completely and never with the same abruptness that happened with Bikram, but I go through a now familiar mini-breakup: with some of the people I've met, with the rhythm of showing up at the studio and putting my stuff in a certain place and going for juice afterward at this or that café, with the very idea of myself that naturally gets built around any routine. But I've learned to see that as the point.

Writers say, "Kill your darlings." Buddhists say, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" I say, Don't let the practice—whether yin yoga or boxing or model-train building—be a substitute for the progress. Yoga is everywhere, except when you forget how to feel.

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